today’s quest to get to the bottom of the 54th Avenue mystery had me walking all the way there, through New Calvary at Queens Boulevard and on to 4th Calvary’s gate at 50th Street. So much about that intersection makes no damn sense.
It is a long-term parking sidestreet where every type of vehicle from minivan to large trucks are parked indefinitely.
Today I confirmed that 54th Avenue is indeed a clone street. I thought maybe there was the possibility that the two strips of road were both one-way streets, making one of them 54th Avenue North and the other 54th Avenue South. Nope, they are both 2-way streets. As there are no street-facing structures on 54th Avenue North I guess there is no chance of address conflicts, nor would there be any chance of that problem since there is really no damn room to build any kind of domicile on that little arc of street. Should decisions be made to tear down the modest houses on 54th Avenue South then I think a street renaming would be in order.
To make matters more confusing the street signs at that intersection are completely borked. 50th Street faces where 54th Avenue North is. And the street address for Calvary Cemetery, printed on the entry gates, also is confusing. I think it was 53-09 50th Street. That only makes sense if there was once a proximity to 53rd Avenue. I could not figure out if there was such a proximity from old maps, which seem to suggest that 50th Street was not present in the pre-1920s Queens street grid.
My guess is that 54th Avenue North was previously considered a driveway or something like that, leading in to 4th Calvary. It is too short a piece of road for this much mental machination but it’s fun digging in to things like this. It becomes like analyzing the Zapruder film, you can find so many inconsistencies and entropical chaos in a single moment in time, or a place. And this is more fun because there is not an exploding executive cranium to deal with.
…
TIL: There was once a land called MUSCLE ISLAND in New York. That was what I thought, at least, when looking at an 1873 map of Queens and spotting a land mass by that name at the fork of Newtown Creek and Maspeth Creek. That map had spelled MUSCLE in its non-fishy way. The real name is meant to be spelled MUSSEL. It was at one time owned by Peter Cooper, who once petitioned to have a drawbridge built between the island and neighboring Brooklyn. Mussel Island was obliterated in 1929, though eerie images of the land survive in the 1924 NYC aerial satellite images.
It seems to have a more interesting history than has been written. I mean if Peter Cooper did business or even lived there then it must have witnessed some interesting activity. I wasted a fair amount of time today looking for MUSCLE ISLAND, thinking that was such an intriguing name, before finally realizing I was spelling it wrong, or rather that the map I found had spelled it wrong. I got a laugh out of checking my Hagstron wall map of the 5 boroughs and finding that MUSSEL ISLAND survived on that map, which was published long after the island’s destruction. They put funny easter egg type things like that in their maps, probably as a way to tell if their maps were being copied. I think “The Shed” was another such Hagstrom-only location that did not really exist.
